Denise McDonagh’s decision to take over as director of the G-Cloud programme in addition to her existing role of running Home Office IT seems a herculean challenge, but after 25 years in government technology it’s one that McDonagh has adopted willingly.

According to McDonagh: "It’s really good to have your foot in both camps". She argues that having the knowledge and experience of running IT in a major delivery department alongside driving a "game changing" programme and its inherent cultural changes is "a whole different tack, which I think is paying off well".

After less than two months in her post, McDonagh says her aim is to run the G-Cloud programme as openly and transparently as possible. "And we want iteration and working out loud, by which I mean that things change so quickly. No one owned an iPad two or three years ago."

Central government has a target for 50% of its IT spend to go on cloud services by 2015. Under her predecessor Chris Chant, McDonagh believes the programme enabled a huge supply market more than 250 suppliers and a whole range of new services to government. "We need to work with the supplier community to make sure those services continue to be available and that new services come on and off as we go through a kind of journey together."

To achieve this, McDonagh says she is concentrating on "propagation" of the G-Cloud programme and the CloudStore catalogue. "Propagation for me is about how I help the public sector central and local government, the NHS, charities, education and skills to think about how and when they use the service and can transition from where they are now into cloud services. And we are doing a whole host of work around that behavioural and cultural change just now."

Specialist "buy camps" for government purchasers, supplier expos, communities of interest focused in particular business problems or services, and an "Ask Mike" online information service are among McDonagh’s initiatives to promote the G-Cloud.

Her ambition is for the CloudStore to be a "vehicle" for other frameworks. "So you will have things like an application development framework, and there will be frameworks around PSN, around government hosting. ‘Why don’t we use CloudStore as the vehicle for accessing all the services on those frameworks?’ That’s the kind of conversation we’re beginning to have, so we can make CloudStore a truly government store."

McDonagh wants CloudStore data to be tailored to particular communities of interest. She does not envisage a separate catalogue for the NHS, for example, but to be "able to cut and splice the data from things that are of more interest to the NHS, maybe patient record systems."

The first iteration of CloudStore opened to buyers in mid-February, with contracts worth £500,000 signed in the first 10 weeks, including a support services deal for the Home Office. One of the aims of the project has been to enable more SMEs to do business with government. McDonagh points out that 74% of CloudStore providers are SMEs and sales have been made by Cat N, Jadu and Inovem.

Last month suppliers were invited to join the second iteration of CloudStore. McDonagh says that 244 companies have expressed an interest so far, but she expects many more. In addition, the G-Cloud team is in discussions with 50 public bodies through ‘Ask Mike’, which is helping them decide what and how to buy.

"We are all blogging and tweeting whenever anything new comes out," says McDonagh. "That is one of the things about the cloud philosophy: everything is transparent, everything is out there. If anyone asks us a question, we answer it to everybody."

Good communication appears to have been crucial to improvements to the second CloudStore, which have been based on feedback from suppliers and buyers. According to McDonagh the changes include better search facilities, allowing suppliers to update their information and making the submissions process easier. "We are continually asking for feedback on the CloudStore and we will make more changes as we go forward," she says.

CloudStore still only provides a full end-to-end service to organisations that have access to the government e-marketplace – in essence central departments. Is it a problem that the NHS and councils can only use CloudStore as a catalogue? "This is one of the conversations that I am having with our government procurement people," McDonagh responds. "I am sure they would want to open it to everyone."

The recent haemorrhage of IT talent from Whitehall – Ian Watmore, Joe Harley, Bill McLuggage and McDonagh’s G-Cloud predecessor Chris Chant could also be seen as a setback. McDonagh argues that government needs IT professionals with a different set of capabilities, however. "And as part of Andy Nelson running the whole kind of ICT capability strand, this is one of the things we will be addressing.

"I have a personal view of the types of capabilities that we need going forward, and it is all about how the departments need to take responsibility for integration. We cannot outsource that."

In McDonagh’s view, where government has worked with big service integrators this has presented as many problems as it has solved. And risk is never outsourced so that, when things go wrong, it is civil servants who are held responsible.

"For my mind, it is about departments stepping up and looking at how we do integration," she believes, "And that is not just systems, it is also service, commercial, procurement, how do we do all that integrating function as we go forward. And that requires a different set of capabilities than we currently have."

Some industry analysts are concerned that achieving the savings goals for CloudStore set out in the government’s ICT strategy – £20m this year, £40m in 2013-14 and £120m in 2014-15 will be a struggle. Does McDonagh believe the project is on target to meet these savings? "I certainly believe we are," she says. "I will be in very big trouble if we don’t." She points out, however, that the savings attributed to the CloudStore also include those from data consolidation.

McDonagh has been described as a "vocal reformer" and she admits that she has never made a secret of her frustration, annoyance and disappointment with how IT is currently delivered to the public sector.

"The cost of it, the fact that we lock ourselves into these long-term contracts with suppliers who quite often let us down," she explains. "And I think I have not shied away from saying these things.

"That is why I am passionate about cloud as well – because I really do want to change the way we deliver."